With Anaplan, you can move people between departments and cost centers without having to restructure your model. Easily roll up individuals into multiple dynamic hierarchies—by skill set, by location, or even by different departments. Their expenses automatically go to a designated cost center based on the effective dates they were transferred.

Excess capacity directly damages the bottom line and under capacity compromises customer service that could potentially damage revenue. With Anaplan, you can easily integrate demand forecasts and write driver-based rules to identify capacity needs and monitor them against actual staff availability. Make changes to highly granular models down to the individual employee level. Get the results on the fly so capacity is always tightly aligned with the latest demand forecast.

Anaplan’s built-in intelligence means the platform has great flexibility when it comes to time periods. You can develop staffing plans based on days or day-parts with results that automatically roll up into the standard monthly view for expense reporting needed by the finance department.

Case study

Leading cloud CRM company / $4B in revenue

A fast-growing cloud computing company approached Anaplan with a workforce planning problem. Faced with an over reliance on IT support for gathering critical data across the globe in an Excel™-based process, a leading CRM company with over $4B in revenue turned to Anaplan for a unified platform with its single data source that allows for “collaborative spread-sheeting” across the globe. The team can now synthesize data from various sources across the organization to deliver both ad-hoc and detailed reports to executives to make mission-critical workforce planning decisions.

The Director of Strategic Planning manages the group of financial analysts that are responsible for providing executives with the information they need to make mission-critical workforce planning decisions. The team synthesizes data from various sources across the organization to deliver both ad-hoc and detailed reports to executives.

The Excel™-based process of meeting executives’ requests was unwieldy and time-consuming. The team of four people was tasked with consolidating spreadsheets, each with a different level of detail, that they received from up to 30 people.

To further complicate matters, whenever a decision-maker changed their request—asked for a different level of detail or reframed the scope of the question—the team had to go back to square one.

Yet another concern the team faced when working on a workforce plan was that they couldn’t scale in Excel™. Anaplan was deployed, and made an immediate impact on workforce planning, the team’s productivity and the quality of their work. Anaplan has reduced the workload for the entire team.

Anaplan has increased accuracy, calculations are refreshing, and the process is collaborative. It’s more sophisticated and advanced than cloud-based collaboration tools like Google Docs. The team can run complex scenarios to quickly answer questions that might have taken a few days in the old process.

Anaplan has made the team’s previously cumbersome task of taking data from Excel™ and putting into a 50-page PowerPoint presentation—which frequently required up to two 60-hour workweeks—obsolete.

Anaplan allows them to turn workforce planning around faster for executives. Skills and talents are used for important tasks instead of for compiling data, which provides time to be thoughtful. Furthermore, Anaplan can be accessed via an iPad®, which means no longer having to wait for Excel™ spreadsheets and a bound slide deck to be delivered. Anaplan’s dashboard allows the ability to drill down into the data as low as a user wants. Workforce planning can now be done on the go.

The company is experiencing a solid upwards rate of international growth and leadership within its global marketplace. As a result, it is more critical than ever that executive management focus on workforce planning as a means to prepare for the future.